What do you think about the concept of generations?

I don't think that it's a useful label. You could just as easily say "People in their 30s" or "People born in the 90s". They aren't even applied the same way to everyone; some people have arbitrary names ("Gen X", "Gen Y"), some have it based on a time frame ("Millenials"), and some of them are even vaguely insulting ("Boomers" is a bit insulting because it comes from the term "baby boom"; you're basically saying the only thing notable about them is that there are a lot of them). The only thing they are good for is getting people to group together, which only works because they are divisive in nature. In other words, it's a wedge to get people to argue.

All of this is not to say that there aren't generational conflicts, but in reality those are a bunch of small-scale skirmishes largely centered around small groups of individuals, rather than the grand war that certain opinion pieces seem to want to paint them as.

I've never been wild about the whole concept, as demarcated by birth year. I think there might be more value in something similar based on cultural touchstones instead.

The most obvious example for me is the rise of the "digital native," a person who has never known a time before the advent of the web. Of course, the web didn't just appear overnight... different families got plugged in at different times over the span of a decade or two, so whether or not people qualify comes down to their individual experiences. Complicating things, the midpoint of that transition period came right around the middle of the "millennial" window, creating a generation composed of half digital natives and half digital immigrants.

I'm in the latter category, and "millennial" is not terribly useful for describing me. My childhood was offline. I graduated college before the student debt crisis exploded. Struck out on my own and started my career immediately after school. Never got particularly into selfies or emojis or social media or the other things that are supposed to represent millennials. On the other hand, Gen X doesn't really fit either.

If the lines were redrawn to account for more than just age, generations might be a useful concept. But not in their current form.

I really dislike the concept of generations. While some personality aspects are consistent across most people in a single age group, I find that on the whole, generational classifications only serve to generalize and insult members of any particular generation. We can see this with how millennials were categorized as lazy and entitled, and now how baby boomers are categorized as out of touch and rude. I watched this great talk by Adam Conover about how basically all people are diverse and have different interests and abilities, and so it is counterproductive to categorize people by age at all.

It makes a lot more sense in the context of a community or family than for a massive population or nation. In my family we are very clearly divided among my grandfather's generation, my parents', mine, and me and my cousins' children. Each of these generation has some very specific formative experiences and upbringings because we all were growing up exposed to similar things.

But nation-wide, especially in a nation of immigrants, it makes no sense. Different sub-groups each have different formative experiences. For an immigrant family especially, the generation of immigration is the actual definitive break point, and the generations since immigration for that family are the most salient "counting unit." First gen, second gen, third gen, etc.

The greatest, boomer, X, millennial, etc. division only makes sense in the form of a similar generational event for them, WWII. Everything is kind of an echo of that event and how disruptive it was to society and culture. Prior to that, WWI was the thing and prior to that the Civil War the thing. But when we're this far from the actual inciting event it doesn't make sense anymore. The same way that after three generations from immigration it makes less and less sense to talk about a fourth or fifth generation immigrant. At that point, the immigrant status has less salience to them.

The trouble is that there is no universally agreed upon definition for these generations and anyone near the beginning of one generation will have a very different experience than those near the end and, on top of that, they'll as often as not get grouped in with the previous generation than the one they think they are in. I was born in the early 80s and always thought that I would be in the next generation after Gen X but almost no one my age seems to self describe as Millennial. Certainly the media seems to be talking about late Millennials or even very early Gen Z whenever they mention "Millennials" so perhaps by the commonly used definition I'm Gen X or "Xennial" if you subscribe to the in-between generations.

Also, if you're a late Gen Z wouldn't that make you like 4 or something? Did you mean early Gen Z? Depending who you ask that could make you as young as 14 or as old as 24.

I think they have rather less value than horoscopes. The Zodiac is at least a bit more granular, and just as meaningless. You just can't group people into such large categories, people's lives, experiences and personalities are way too diverse. It's misleading and unhelpful to do so.

Nobody ever talked about generations in the way we do now when I was growing up in the UK, it's only since the concept migrated over the Atlantic that it seems to have become a thing here. It's always seemed like curiously American thing to me, the desire to put everyone into various little boxes. The popularity stateside of the nonsense that is Myers-Briggs personality types is another example of this.

I love the idea of generations and have been obsessed with the idea since I stumbled upon Strauss and Howe's Generations in my college library about 10 years ago. I should clarify that I am obsessed with generations (specifically, Generations) kinda the same way my hippie Anthro 101 professor was obsessed with Bigfoot, which is to say I don't really believe it, but I really fucking want it to be real.

The closer we get to 2020, the more unsettling their predictions get. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, there is a pretty good summary of the book on Wikipedia. The final chapters predict the unraveling of our current 'saeculum' and the problems they describe fit pretty well with what's going on these days. Even if it is pseudoscience, you still gotta tip your hat just a bit since the book came out around the end of the Cold War and fall of the Soviet Union. While others were writing about 'The End of History,' these guys were drawing up the blueprints for how everything would turn to shit in a decade or so. And they're kinda nailing it.

There are so many ways to criticise and poke holes in their "theory," that it's tough to take seriously; but I definitely think that there is some value in recognizing the different eras that people are born in and how that might effect the way they see the world. I don't know if it should carry the same significance as something like class or race, but it is significant. People who grew up with smart phones, the internet, and school shootings are going to see the world differently than people who grew up with bb guns, three TV channels, and the looming threat of mutually assured destruction.

An interesting note is that in Canada, at least as per Statistics Canada, there are no Millenials:
The baby boomers (1946 to 1965): Baby Boomers
Parents of baby boomers (1919 to 1940): (more-or-less) Silent Generation
Children of baby boomers (1972 to 1992): Generation X / Millenials; Xenials, perhaps?
Generation Z (1993 to Present): Generation Z, Internet Generation, iGeneration

"Finally, people born since 1993 have sometimes been designated as the new Generation Z or the Internet generation since they were born after the invention of the Internet. About 7.3 million people (22% of total population) born between 1993 and 2011 were counted in the 2011 Census. In 2011, these people were aged 18 and under and were just starting to enter the labour market."

Apparently up here in the north, we do it different or something.

SOURCE: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-311-x/98-311-x2011003_2-eng.cfm

I think that the idea of Generations is really interesting and grouping people by the zeitgeist of the age in which they grew up makes a lot of sense, and there's a lot of interesting, large-scale things that we can take from discussion of generations.

What doesn't make sense is the way that people will take those generational labels and apply them to people. That's generally not a particularly interesting or valid thing to do.

For example, I'm a member of "Generation X", and here's a super brief idea of what that means from Wikipedia:

Generation Xers were children during a time of shifting societal values and as children were sometimes called the "latchkey generation", due to reduced adult supervision as children compared to previous generations, a result of increasing divorce rates and increased maternal participation in the workforce, prior to widespread availability of childcare options outside the home. As adolescents and young adults, they were dubbed the "MTV Generation" (a reference to the music video channel). In the 1990s they were sometimes characterized as slackers, cynical and disaffected. Some of the cultural influences on Gen X youth were the musical genres of grunge and hip hop music, and independent films. In midlife, research describes them as active, happy, and achieving a work–life balance. The cohort has been credited with entrepreneurial tendencies.

It's interesting to see the sorts of things that very broadly describe the vast group of people of which I am a part, but there are a lot of things that don't match up with who I am as a person. If I explain I'm from Generation X, and you think that my parents were divorced, I was a latchkey kid, I'm a slacker, and I loved my MTV, then you've made a lot of insane deductions on who I am and what my life has been like. Similarly, if you see someone is a baby boomer and you deduce that they're conservative, wealthy, non-empathetic assholes who think that Millennials cause all the problems, then you're going to have a bad time as well; people come from all walks of life.

As with most categorization aids, they're only as useful as the people using them.

It’s a useful way to form a vocabulary to analyze culture in a historical framework. We should treat the concept as an heuristic tool, not as an actual phenomenon.

But it makes for good headlines.

"Generations" are descriptions of groups that are often way too wide. As an example, let's look at what is considered a millennial:

• They are born from 1981 to 1996: What does someone from 1981 have in common with 1996?

The characteristics of millennials vary by region and by individual,

So they are actually different groups per region AND on individual level...

and the group experiences a variety of social and economic conditions,

Can't really group them here...

but they are generally marked by their coming of age in the Information Age,

Their only distinguishable attribute is when they are born. And even that is a pretty wide definition.

and are comfortable in their usage of digital technologies and social media.

True, but that wouldn't narrow it down if you look at succeeding generations. It's also something that can be learned by earlier generations.

I don't really see the point of assigning such a wide and varied population group a name. You can't really discuss it, because the definition is not strict at all.

Most of it is an artificial construct. I think you can draw some interesting data from demographics, but this idea that people's behaviour depends on which discrete bin their birth year fits into, is nonsense.

From Wikipedia

Nominalists assert that only individuals or particulars exist and deny that universals are real

I wouldn't go that far, but I think that's a frame of thought that can be used effectively to deny the actuality generations as a concrete, real phenomenon.